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Boosting Your Emotional Intelligence

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Frequently Asked Questions

With an eGift, you can instantly send a Great Course to a friend or loved one via email. It's simple:
1. Find the course you would like to eGift.
2. Under "Choose a Format", click on Video Download or Audio Download.
3. Click 'Send e-Gift'
4. Fill out the details on the next page. You will need to the email address of your friend or family member.
5. Proceed with the checkout process as usual.

Q: Why do I need to specify the email of the recipient?

A:
We will send that person an email to notify them of your gift. If they are already a customer, they will be able to add the gift to their My Digital Library and mobile apps. If they are not yet a customer, we will help them set up a new account so they can enjoy their course in their My Digital Library or via our free mobile apps.

Q: How will my friend or family member know they have a gift?

A:
They will receive an email from The Great Courses notifying them of your eGift. The email will direct them to TheGreatCourses.com. If they are already a customer, they will be able to add the gift to their My Digital Library and mobile apps. If they are not yet a customer, we will help them set up a new account so they can enjoy their course in their My Digital Library or via our free mobile apps.

Q: What if my friend or family member does not receive the email?

A:
If the email notification is missing, first check your Spam folder. Depending on your email provider, it may have mistakenly been flagged as spam. If it is not found, please email customer service at (customerservice@thegreatcourses.com) or call 1-800-832-2412 for assistance.

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A:
When the recipient clicks on their email and redeems their eGift, you will automatically receive an email notification.

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A:
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Q: I don't want to send downloads. How do I gift DVDs or CDs?

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A:
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Q: When purchasing a gift for someone, why do I have to create an account?

A:
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Q: Can I return or Exchange a gift after I purchase it?

A:
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Course Overview

We have all had experiences with people that prove that those with the highest IQs are not always the most successful. For example, you may have encountered the technology wizard who’s never been promoted because he isn’t a team player. Or the tenured professor who has no idea why her grown children avoid her. Or the award-winning designer whose temper has caused him lost clients and financial ruin. These are all exceptionally bright individuals with recognized talent in their fields. And yet each has failed to reach his or her own career, personal, or financial goals.

What are these very intelligent people missing?

Chances are, what’s missing is emotional intelligence—the ability to perceive, understand, and manage emotions in ourselves and others. Sounds very powerful, doesn’t it? Can we really manage our own emotions, as opposed to having our emotions run the show? Could we really effect change in the emotions of our coworkers or family members?

The answer to all these questions is a resounding “yes.” Emotional intelligence (or EQ) is a measurement bolstered by a powerful set of skills we can use to improve our quality of life and better meet our goals. As Professor Jason M. Satterfield of the University of California, San Francisco, explains in the 24 informative half-hour lectures of Boosting Your Emotional Intelligence, EQ is an invaluable ability that can be learned, practiced, and used with positive results.

Although emotions have been discussed and debated for millennia, emotional intelligence as a field of inquiry is relatively new, with the term itself first appearing in psychology literature less than thirty-five years ago. In this engaging course, Dr. Satterfield explores:

Historic philosophical and scientific understandings of emotion

The current definition of emotions and the purposes they serve in our lives

Whether or not any given emotion is inherently “good” or “bad”

The cultural context of emotions

The major models of emotional intelligence, their strengths and potential weaknesses, and which parts of each model we might best use to understand our own emotions

The most common ways EQ is measured and the reliability and validity of each methodology

The relationship between emotional intelligence and social intelligence

The newest technological tools intended to increase EQ.

The Impacts of Your Emotions

Whether or not you understand your emotions and their resultant behaviors, they leave their impacts like footprints all over the situations and people with whom you interact throughout your life. If your emotions are constantly running wild and you are hypersensitive to every personal interaction, coworkers might try to avoid your predictable high-energy chaos. If your emotions are shut down tight and rarely see the light of day, friends and partners might eventually stop trying to connect with you on the most personal and intimate levels. You might not be aware of what’s happening in those relationships and what’s causing people to back away from you—but you are impacted by their behavioral choices nevertheless.

In addition, your emotions impact your own cognition, decision-making, and physical body every day. Have you ever been nervous before an academic test or performance review and felt “butterflies” in your stomach? Have you ever felt so surprised or fearful that you “couldn’t think straight?” Or so happy that your physical pain seemed to lessen? In this course, Dr. Satterfield explains the many complex interactions and feedback loops between our emotions, physical body, and cognition.

Learning About Your Emotions

Emotions are visceral experiences. In fact, by definition, they involve whole-body changes in our subjective experience, behavior, and physiology. Since the best way to learn about emotions is to involve as many senses as possible, Dr. Satterfield illustrates his material with a variety of appealing and helpful images, movie clips, and other videos.

In particular, we have the opportunity to watch the development of EQ in action as Dr. Satterfield interacts with three “patients” at many points during this course. We learn from his conversations with:

Carol, a 31-year-old who is learning emotion regulation in order to successfully meet her goals with respect to a new job and her first serious boyfriend

Michael, a 51-year-old partner in an architectural firm who is using executive coaching to improve his work performance

Maria, a recently widowed 71-year-old who wants to better manage her grief and move forward with her life.

How Did I Get This Way—and What Now?

Were you born with the emotional make-up you have today or did you develop it over time? To help you understand the history of your personal EQ, you might want to think about it the same way you think about your athletic ability.

Just as some children seem to be born with a natural athletic ability or more easy-going personalities, some aspects of emotional intelligence are inherited. For example, research has shown that approximately 20 percent of adult Americans have a genetic mutation that makes them inherently less anxious. But no matter your genetic makeup, childhood experiences also play a role. Did your caregivers take you outside to play catch or did they sit you in front of the TV all day? As your EQ was developing, did your parents encourage you to express yourself? Or did they fly off in a rage and then tell you what you should and should not be feeling? Did you have a school coach who helped you learn the correct way to throw a ball? A counselor who helped you understand and overcome your fear of social situations? Each of those factors helped shape your adult abilities and habits—and your EQ.

Fortunately, however, this is where the analogy ends. Because while it might be just a bit too late for you to become a football star, it is never too late to improve your life by improving your EQ. In Boosting Your Emotional Intelligence, you will learn:

How to identify and monitor your own emotions

How to choose which emotional responses you might want to change to better meet your personal goals

A variety of techniques and skills to help you regulate your own emotions

How to identify and monitor emotions in others

When and how to best influence emotions in others

A step-by-step process for building your own interactive Skills Tracker to improve your personal EQ

Where to find numerous online resources to test, model, and improve your EQ as an ongoing, unlimited learning experience.

With the tools and skills you gather from this exciting, interactive course, you will be able to improve your emotional intelligence now and throughout your life—using your emotions as you want, to help reach your own personal goals.

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24 lectures

| Average 31 minutes each

1

What Is Emotional Intelligence (EQ)?

Learn about the relatively recent emergence of emotional intelligence as a unique field of inquiry and the three leading theories used to describe and understand EQ. With your emotion journal, you'll start building your EQ Skills Tracker, a running library of what you learn in this course about your own emotions and a to-do list for future learning. x

2

Measuring EQ

Measuring your IQ is straightforward, and the standardization of scores on the overall test and subtests are well established. But quantifying your EQ is a much newer and more complex endeavor. How can you measure your EQ and what will those results really tell you? Learn about the four most highly regarded EQ assessment tools and how they each rate with respect to validity and reliability. x

3

Exploring Emotions

Although you’ve experienced emotions every day of your life, learning to manage them requires an understanding of how emotions are generated. Learn about the steps in this process and resulting feedback cycles as described in the Modal Model of Emotions. Does this model explain your “good” and “bad” emotions? You’ll be surprised. x

4

Embodied Emotions

Do your emotions affect your physical body or do changes in your physical body cause your emotions? Learn which parts of your central and peripheral nervous systems contribute to the experiences we recognize as emotions. But if we really want to improve our EQ, we must also look at our cognition. x

5

Emotional Impacts

You probably already realize that your EQ affects your most intimate relationships—your ability to choose appropriate partners and develop long-term satisfying and productive relationships. But the impact of your EQ doesn’t stop there. Learn how your emotions affect every aspect of your life, including your professional and social relationships, cognition, decision-making, and physical health. x

6

Perceiving and Expressing Emotions

When speaking to someone in person, you pick up clues as to that individual's emotional state from the words used, the tone of voice, posture, and facial expressions. But what about self-perception? How good are you at perceiving and identifying your own emotions? Learn the EQ skills that can help you improve your understanding of yourself. x

7

Understanding Emotions

What are the primary emotions and their associated thoughts and behaviors—emotions found across all cultures, languages, and income and educational levels? Learn how to perceive and correctly identify emotions and their triggers, and to explore the complex relationships between emotions we classify as positive and negative. x

8

Managing Your Emotions

All of us have felt at times that our emotions were in charge and we were just helplessly along for the ride. Maybe we've hyper-reacted from a place of anger and fear. Or we've made poor and long-lasting decisions while riding a wave of euphoria. It doesn't have to be that way. Learn about antecedent-focused and response-focused emotion regulation strategies and how to employ them for your own benefit. x

9

Managing Others' Emotions

As the famous joke goes, no one has ever become calm because another person ordered them to “Calm down!” But are there real ways we can influence another person’s emotions and consequent behaviors? Although we can never access anyone else’s cognition, the EQ skills we use in our communication and interaction with others can be powerfully influential. x

10

The Development of EQ

Research has shown that while genetic makeup does play a role in our EQ, it also is significantly impacted by how we were parented and socialized as a young child. But even if childhood was not ideal and our parents modeled very poor EQ skills, see how it is always possible to improve EQ now through purposeful training. x

11

Emotional Intelligence Training

Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) is now taught in more than 30,000 schools across the U.S. because research has revealed a close relationship between emotions and learning. However, “a close relationship” is not the same as cause and effect. Explore several of the most popular SEL programs and their goals and strengths—and learn why outcomes are so difficult to measure. x

12

Social Intelligence

We've all been in certain social situations we wish we could just forget: that awkward first date, the floundering job interview, the performance review that took us completely by surprise. Learn how to use your EQ to improve your social intelligence and strengthen social relationships in every aspect of your life. x

13

Intimacy and EQ

The quality of your baby-caregiver relationship does affect your EQ skills and later relationships. But regardless of previous attachment styles, EQ training can teach you how to successfully express and perceive emotions—two necessary skills for successful adult intimate relationships. Learn how to understand your “habits of heart” and make appropriate adjustments to meet your goals. x

14

Interpersonal Conflict

We are all aware that conflict exists between individuals or distinct social groups that see each other as “different.” Conflict is part of life, and groups of people are always going to disagree on some issues. But emotional and social intelligence skills can help us find common ground, address, and even solve many of our personal and community issues. x

15

EQ in the Workplace

EQ skills can have a positive impact in any group of people working together toward a common goal. In addition to helping personal interaction among workplace teams, EQ skills have been shown to facilitate creativity, excitement, and enthusiasm in employees and leadership alike. x

16

Occupational Stress and Burnout

Since 1995, work stress in the U.S. has increased 300 percent, with the most significant issues being depersonalization and disconnection. In many cases the use of EQ skills such as somatic quieting and improved concentration and focus can help. But could “love” be the newest way to lessen workplace stress? x

17

Leadership and EQ

While companies spent $31 billion on leadership-training programs in just one recent year, more than 60 percent of respondents to the Global Human Capital Survey reported that such programs yielded only “some” value at best. Learn how EQ skills training is helping many business leaders better accomplish their long-term goals. x

18

Workplace Culture

Being aware of EQ skills in all aspects of workplace culture can lead to greater workforce engagement with employees who feel seen, heard, and valued. But actively managing workforce culture isn’t just a “feel good” for employees. Explore why companies that proactively manage their culture experience average 10-year revenue growth 516 percent higher than those who do not. x

19

Stress Management

Learn about the nervous and hormonal systems that cause our physiological responses to stress, and how they are related to chronic disease. Research shows that improving our EQ skills can help mediate these reactions in the body, possibly leading to both a safer stress response and better health overall. x

20

Emotion Regulation Disorders

Heightened emotional experience—a common characteristic of anxiety and depression—could potentially be helped by EQ skills. Learn how Dialectical Behavior Therapy and the relatively new Emotion Regulation Therapy address certain common elements and skill deficiencies in a variety of “distress disorders,” regardless of specific diagnosis. x

21

Behavior Change and EQ

If you’ve ever tried to change a significant behavior—quit smoking, lose weight, be more patient with your co-workers—you know how very difficult it can be. But you’ll be ahead of the game if you consider the role your emotions play in your behavioral choices and motivation. Learn how to improve your self-efficacy and develop a plan of “SMART” goals. x

22

Chronic Disease and EQ

Medical professionals have long known that a patient's emotions play a key role in accepting and managing a diagnosis of chronic disease. But recent research reveals additional relationships between EQ and health-oriented behaviors. Explore the specific ways in which EQ can affect the management of two widespread chronic health problems: alcohol-use disorders and cardiovascular disease. x

23

Emotional Intelligence in Health Care

Have you ever left a medical appointment feeling angry, frustrated, or even insulted? Whether it was the content of the meeting or the personalities involved that caused your frustration, you can learn how to improve your healthcare interactions by better understanding and monitoring your emotions—and those of your healthcare provider. x

24

The Future of Emotional Intelligence

Does technology help or hurt our EQ? On the one hand, we all know the difficulty of accurately perceiving emotions when communicating by email, text, or other electronic platforms. But surprising advances in facial recognition, physiological response monitoring, and other software offer exciting and helpful futuristic options in the quest to improve our EQ. x

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Download 24 video lectures to your computer or mobile app

Downloadable PDF of the course guidebook

FREE video streaming of the course from our website and mobile apps

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24 lectures on 4 DVDs

240-page printed course guidebook

Downloadable PDF of the course guidebook

FREE video streaming of the course from our website and mobile apps

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Course Guidebook Details:

240-page printed course guidebook

Suggested Reading

Questions to Consider

Bibliography

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Your professor

About Your Professor

Jason M. Satterfield, Ph.D.

University of California, San Francisco

Professor Jason M. Satterfield is Professor of Clinical Medicine, Director of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Director of Behavioral Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He earned his B.S. in Brain Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. He currently directs the...

Reviews

Boosting Your Emotional Intelligence is rated
3.9 out of
5 by
18.

Rated 3 out of
5 by
Jam1941 from
The topic is certainly worthy!The teacher is well informed.
This 'ho-hum' rating is for two reasons:
1. the teacher seems to be reading from a tele-promptor which makes him seem disconnected from his audience.
2. the teacher refers, too many times, to his 'other' course that he obviously wants us to buy. I resent that sort of badgering.

Date published: 2019-06-21

Rated 5 out of
5 by
Chromeo from
Amazing Course!With Stress being the cause of so many diseases, this course is extremely valuable to help cope with its ever increasing impact on health. I particularly bought the course to learn more about depression, a disease that is devastating to so many people and their families, as well as being the focus of the World Health Organization for 2018.

Date published: 2018-07-04

Rated 5 out of
5 by
Darrow from
Super courses. One never has to go to school it's all in The Great Courses.

Date published: 2018-04-18

Rated 3 out of
5 by
Pakari from
Boosting Your EIThis course would be much better in the video format. The professor is very knowledgeable, but the pace of presentation is too fast. It's not a course for those who are new to the subject matter.

Date published: 2018-01-09

Rated 4 out of
5 by
Alan Ph from
Fast paced presentationWhile the presentation is fast paced with little recap, I can read the book then replay the lesson for better understanding.

Date published: 2017-12-23

Rated 3 out of
5 by
Bill700 from
The title assumes a DIY lens.As a therapist I am interested in either a "product" that I can recommend or that I can learn from - the CBT course was good for that. However, this course is flat/single-dimensioned. EQ is three dimensional and needs to be seen both that was and also relationally.

Date published: 2017-11-27

Rated 5 out of
5 by
Joe11 from
Interesting DVD setWhen I make time to watch this, it will be one of the compelling series that I watch.

Date published: 2017-10-28

Rated 3 out of
5 by
Moshen from
Academically Jumbled, Miscellaneously OrganizedIf you're looking for a solid academic course, like most of those the Teaching Company has issued over time, you may find this course quite disappointing.
It's not organized in any logical or sequential way. Topics follow each other almost randomly. Why on earth did he discuss methods of measuring Emotional Intelligence before discussing what emotion is, for example? That doesn't make sense.
There are way too many references to a prior course by the same professor, as if this course should have been taken after the other one, although again there's no valid reason for that from the learner's point of view.
I found the clips of therapy sessions troubling because the professor never told us whether these were actual therapy clips or presented by actors. In one of the sessions, the professor even told the client that the session was absolutely confidential. Yet there we were listening to or watching it.
There are quite a number of movie clips also in the course that the professor assumes are self-explanatory, because he merely shows them without drawing out their implications. What he doesn't seem to realize is that people who have low emotional intelligence (who are taking the course for that reason) may need to have things pointed out to them explicitly that are obvious to others.
Indeed, he pretty much ignored the question of why some people are naturally gifted when it comes to emotions (like Martin Luther King, Jr. - and like Hitler, as well) while others struggle to read the emotions of others and/or understand themselves (such as, perhaps, people labeled as having autism or Asperger's). And he says very little about the influence of culture, ethnicity, gender and so on on Emotional Intelligence.
These are some of the serious flaws that bothered me throughout the course, though I did listen to the end. Giving it three stars is generous.